Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 19 - July 3, 2018
For myself, I feel that nature is good enough and rich enough that a “supernatural” is not required. Therefore I try to look at the imponderables as things to ponder, certainly not to be dismissed as fantasy, phantasmagoria, or spectral deceits.
When the world proves larger than we expected, we need to let out the seams in our mindset, and there should be no limits.
To dismiss the unknown out of hand is even more foolish than to accept it unquestioned, more foolhardy than to fear it.
On the other side of the trail a big mixed feeding flock of migratory songbirds thronged a mountain ash hanging from an outcrop. A female warbler on a rowan bough spread her softly yellowed wing, reaching past the brighter yellow leaflets for a fly on a bunch of fire-engine berries; beyond, the blue spire of a young noble fir was decked with juncos and warblers. We take trees and berried greenery indoors once a year and hang dead ornaments on them in honor of the season. Each season honors us the better, if we attend, with living decorations such as these.
An ouzel dipped in alarm at seeing me, then shot past to the rim of a falls. Who would credit this plumbeous slug as a bird, so fishlike at times, so versatile in making water work for itself? One might ask whether dipper, in all its shades and ways, is more or less believable than Sasquatch. Or swifts, scything the sky with all the elegance of an ouzel underwater, making nonsense of gravity itself.
When Bigfoot enthusiasts gather, they debate whether the subject of their attention is a “primitive” hominid or not. In fact, insofar as it is powerfully fit for life in the world in a way that few humans today can even imagine, I would say that Sasquatch represents the advanced condition, that of the superior ape.
I’m surprised every time I step outdoors, but if you want to be surprised every moment you’re awake, you head to fresh territory with your eyes open.
Another pleasure is the rush that comes from recognizing the individuality of other life forms—the hit that naturalists, situated in the midst of the grand biological parade, get every time they meet something new. Few of us will ever know newness the way Linnaeus did in Lapland, when he first came upon the boreal twinflower, now known by the lovely name Linnaea (and here it was, at my feet). But we know the sweetness of first encounter. The pleasure is deeply visceral; you feel it in your belly as well as your head. Sad, how few ever experience this joy, for close observers are almost as rare
...more
As we confront questions that we expect to have answers, we are left perched awkwardly on a two-horned dilemma: do we accept the Indians’ relative universe, where beaver and Bigfoot, magic and muscle, are all expressions of the same thing? Or do we stick with our own material tradition and demand an answer devoid of metaphysical paradox?
We live in an age when control—the grid, the boot, the gun, the nozzle, the law—has the upper hand. We have lost the wild repositories of power beyond the campfire, the mythic figures in which we might invest our fears, whom we might supplicate in pursuit of hope. Instead we have religions that rule behavior and perpetuate themselves through the application of order and conformity. For all of its values, contemporary religious life offers little of the all-embracing ardor of any “pagan” culture.
Later I heard Peter’s words echoed in Wayne Suttles’s view that while Sasquatch-like creatures “may inhabit the real world of the Indians, this may not be relevant to the question of whether they inhabit the real world of Western science.” And Chief Lelooska spoke of things you could see only when watching “with Indian eyes.” Many would conclude that Datus also sees the world with eyes different from ours. So why do we tend to venerate the one as spiritual and write off the other as deluded?
Or perhaps, as Marjorie Halpin wrote in Manlike Monsters on Trial, “As long as Sasquatch is a personal rather than a collectively sanctioned experience it will remain hallucinatory as officially defined by Western culture.” I guess Datus Perry doesn’t much care. He just sees what he sees.
Earlier I suggested that the discovery of Bigfoot would make the spotted owl’s impact on forest planning look mild. Wouldn’t it be rich if it turned out that the spotted owl accounts for many of the sounds that Indians and whites have long reported as giants’ whistles? I think of Tah-Tah-Klé-ah, the Owl Woman Monster, and realize that the connection is not new.
I had gone into this investigation hoping to keep an open mind on the subject of Bigfoot. To me, having a truly open mind is a rare state, easier to define by its opposites. One thing it does not mean is belief; faith is the opposite of an open mind. Another condition that has nothing to do with open-mindedness is gullibility or credulousness, which are just forms of faith-hunger. Coming from the other direction, I can further define the term by stating that it also opposes the hard head and the set jaw. It refracts impressions rather than reflecting them. An open mind is a window, not a
...more
An open mind neither rejects nor limits itself to the scientific method but considers it among the other tools for palping the universe. It doubts everything and accepts everyone. It is completely skeptical and wholly receptive, seldom wishy-washy but often unsettled. The open mind is not afraid to be made up, then, like a bed, to be thrashed, stripped, and made fresh all over again. Convictions? The open mind has them. But like everything else, convictions are liable to amendment.
To see is to be open, to take it all in without being taken in, to be aware of the sweet possibilities of the world. What more could you want? How much more fun than being the willing slave of instant opinion, pro or con, closing the door from either direction.
